Every project handles this differently, and because of the huge variety of environments and potential build complications in comparison to pretty much every oth

Every project handles this differently, and because of the huge variety of environments and potential build complications in comparison to pretty much every other language, I think it would be very hard to get a supermajority of the C and C++ communities in agreement on a package manager. That being said, there are package managers like vcpkg and conan that work just fine. They will just never be ubiquitous like pip or npm or cargo. Projects are going to continue to want to manage these sorts of issues themselves in a lot of circumstances. For new projects on a supported platform, I'd recommend going ahead and just using vcpkg. But that's just my opinion. And there is code I work on where that wouldn't be possible. Plus some people just don't like the things that package managers tend to encourage.